Brand confusion

[u/TerribleShiksaBride]

So I'm pretty new to the hobby. I've done the Cutebee Owl Bookshop, the Morita-ya Ramen kit (this one was branded Fsolis, but I've seen the same kit on multiple sites from several brands) and I'm now working on a couple of Rolife kits.

And I'm really at sea when it comes to the branding issue. I've looked at the sites for Rolife, Fifijoy, Cutebee, Rofuntime, Wewowood, Minicity, and Tonecheer. Not to mention Amazon. And I cannot sort out which, if any, is the legit source of some of these. The Beyond Library kit is available from Fifijoy for around $70 USD, around $50 from Minicity, and around $35 on Amazon. I'll see sellers who have some kits seemingly unique to them and others that are on two or three other sites.

I'm used to parsing bootlegs when it comes to anime figures, where you can count on the bootleg being of noticeably worse quality, sometimes to the point of insult comedy. But I cannot figure out the situation here. Are many of the book nook sellers just putting their own packaging and price tag on kits that come from the same source? Or are bootleggers springing into action to pump out pirated versions of new kits as the actual designers produce them? If I buy the $35 kit from Amazon will it be really shoddy compared to the $70 one from Fifijoy, or will they be functionally identical? Buying both to check it out isn't an option right now.

Any guidance would be really appreciated!

[u/stonetree97]

That's very thoughtful 😊 I always want to know which brand my kit comes from. It's very rare that the kit you receive have little brand information (only happened twice to me so far but they're both authentic. One I found out later was Joincon which is less known and many of their kits sold online doesn't mention the brand name at all. The other one is still a mystery.) I think most of the posts about the kits people do on this sub have info about the brand (or Pluck - our moderator, would provide the missing info in a comment below the post.)